Chains and Memory (2 page)

I'd heard that reasoning before. My lawyer said nearly the same thing when he told me he was going to drag his heels every step of the way in my court case. The lower courts had all ruled that under the current law, I was a wilder, and therefore subject to the authority of the Division for Special Psychic Affairs—deep shield included. We'd managed to get a stay of execution on that ruling while we went through the appeals process, though, and Lotze had taken his sweet time filing every bit of paperwork he could. It was a delicate dance, making sure he didn't piss off a judge along the way, but the payoff was that I was walking around unshielded the whole time, a safe and trustworthy member of society. It didn't have any direct bearing on the legal issues, but the effect was still real. A judge who didn't believe I
needed
to be shielded was a judge inclined to look on our side's case with a favorable eye.

In political terms, I was a live grenade nobody wanted to be left holding. Congress wished the Supreme Court would rule on my case so they wouldn't have to rewrite the law to deal with pesky ambiguities like me. The Supreme Court wanted Congress to fix the law so they wouldn't have to rule on my case. And the Division for Special Psychic Affairs was screaming bloody murder the whole time, because their job was to make sure wilders didn't cause mayhem in the streets. A brand-new wilder with no shield and only half a college degree in divination under her belt was pretty much their nightmare scenario.

The worst part was, they weren't entirely wrong. Before this happened to me, I didn't use pyrokinesis much because my gift for it was really weak. Now I didn't use it at all, because I couldn't trust myself not to fireball an entire candle when I meant to light the wick. I'd spent the last nine years with a toolbox containing things ranging from screwdrivers to needle-nosed pliers, and then the Unseelie hid the toolbox and handed me a sledgehammer. I was still trying to find where my subtlety had gone.

Which meant, among other things, that I was being exceedingly careful about reading other people. Ramos was hard to read anyway; being a baseline, she couldn't do any of the unconscious telepathic projection that bloods often did. I had to go by body language alone, and that was an eye-opening experience. I didn't realize how much time I'd spent around psychics until I found myself working with somebody who had no gifts at all.

We talked a bit longer after that, mainly questions of how long conference would take—Ramos said, “Your tarot cards might know, but I sure as hell don't”—and what little I could do to help. My mother had been acting as my advocate, working every D.C. connection she had on my behalf, but my own use basically ended at being a poster child for the cause.

Which was galling as hell after last fall. I'd been an active participant in the return of the sidhe, even to the point of being kidnapped and genetically rewritten by the Unseelie. Now I was just a bystander.

Maybe it was my frustration that made me pause as I was about to head out. “Did you need something else?” Ramos asked, already halfway back to her desk.

Part of me said I shouldn't ask, but the words refused to stay down. “Senator . . . don't take this the wrong way. But — why are you helping me?”

She stopped, laying her hands on the surface of her desk. Her steady regard made me shift uncomfortably. “You mean, why would a baseline like me take an interest in a cause that is so profoundly about sidhe blood and its gifts.”

I never would have said it that way. But now that she had, I didn't want to lie. I nodded.

Ramos looked down at her hands. She wore a wedding ring, and touched it now with her thumb, rotating it slightly. “You never knew my wife. She passed away a few years ago—she was quite a bit older than I am. She was a blood, and a doctor. Her specialty was dealing with psi-sickness.”

I swallowed hard. The return of the sidhe had brought the answers to a lot of questions, one of which was the nature of psi-sickness. It turned out to be the flip side of the wilder coin: if people like Julian were the success story, my brother Noah and others like him were the failures. I was lucky I'd survived what the Unseelie did to me. My odds had not been very good.

Ramos said, “My wife had a child when she was much younger. A wilder. I haven't mentioned it before now because I don't feel right trying to claim her experience for my own; I'm not the one who lost a child to the current law. But I know that if she were still alive, she would have supported you.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I said quietly. It seemed insufficient somehow, but I didn't know what else to say.

“I am not doing this
only
for Carrina,” Ramos said, her voice stronger. “Don't start thinking you're only a pity case, a memorial for my late wife. But that is where it started.”

I would have accepted being a pity case, if it meant having an ally as effective as Ramos. But I was glad to be more than that. “Good luck tomorrow,” I said, and headed home to fret.

~

“Mr. Fiain!”

Surprise and confusion stopped Julian in his tracks. Almost no one called him that, because every wilder was a Fiain. Even in official situations, they usually went by their first names. The only reason for someone to call him “Mr. Fiain” was if the speaker had no idea who he was.

He turned to look, wondering if someone was in trouble and calling for a Guardian—someone they assumed was a Guardian—to help. What he found instead was a table with a middle-aged woman standing behind it, and an array of flyers in front of her held down by lumps of crystal. It was still possible she needed help, though, so he kept his expression neutral as he approached. “Yes?”

She was white and probably in her forties, and psychic. She didn't meet Julian's eyes, of course, but she directed her gaze and her words at his sternum with no shortage of enthusiasm. “Will you sign our petition? The government
has
to listen, if you speak.”

It would be nice if that were true,
he thought sourly. “What's the petition?” A quick scan of the flyers showed an array of Wiccan symbols and some familiar words.
Otherworld. Sidhe.
It gave him an inkling even before she answered.

“A request—no, a
demand
—for them to let the sidhe come home! The Otherworld has returned to us at last, and they think they have the right to keep the two worlds separate? They're keeping you from your family!”

At times like this, Julian was grateful for the long years of practice that taught him not to show his true thoughts. Without that, he would have laughed in this woman's face.

She didn't recognize him. His name had been in the news often enough after Welton closed down, and sometimes they included his picture . . . but until technomagic found a way to convey psychic powers through audio or video, an image would always fall short of truly representing a wilder on screen.

If she actually
looked
at him, she might recognize his face. So long as she kept her gaze below his chin, though, she had no idea he'd been the first one to make contact with the sidhe last fall.

“They aren't my family,” he said, trying to keep the words neutral instead of harsh. Even the friendly Seelie were far more alien to him than human beings were. “And the planar injunction is a good idea. Without it, we'd have chaos right now.”

They had some amount of chaos anyway, and whether or not the planar injunction was having any real effect was anybody's guess. It was the greatest undertaking of ceremonial magic in recorded history: a global ward placed at the boundary between the mortal world and the Otherworld, restricting contact between the two. Julian was certain the sidhe could violate it if they wanted to, though they had promised the U.N. they would respect it until some kind of agreement could be reached about relations between the two realms. Whether they could violate it without anybody noticing was less certain.

But at least it prevented people like this woman from jaunting off to meet the fairies. And it meant there weren't sidhe openly walking around every major city, sparking riots and religious revivals everywhere they went. There had still been some riots, usually when demonstrations and counter-protests went sour, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been—at least so far.

“Chaos?” the woman said indignantly. “This is the promised day! Our immortal cousins have returned to us at last! Once they bring their gifts to the whole world, we won't suffer these problems, the hatred of the baseline for the blood. You won't be shunned for your power!”

There was no way to answer her that wouldn't turn into an argument.
Have you read
any
First Manifestation history?
would only make her defensive.
The Unseelie nearly killed the woman I love by sharing their “gifts” with her
would give away his identity and draw far too much attention.

If you're so eager to see me welcomed in, why won't you look me in the eye?

“I'm afraid I have an appointment to keep,” Julian said, and walked away.

Naive as that woman was, Julian had heard and read about far worse. A cult had formed in New Mexico and then committed mass suicide, convinced they would reincarnate as sidhe. A new Christian sect was on the rise in Iowa, preaching that the return of the Otherworld was the Second Coming, and a Seelie Christ would rain destruction on all the baselines while sweeping the sidhe-blooded psychics into paradise. Fiain had been attacked in Seattle, Houston, Kansas City. At least that woman and her petition weren't violent.

Things in D.C. had been relatively quiet, thanks to some well-calibrated efforts to keep the peace. A number of Fiain Guardians had arrived over the last few months, likely drawn there by the ancient
geas
that guided them to where trouble would be. Marches and protests were monitored for flash points even before they began, courtesy of extensive divination, and the failure of the nation's capital to go up in flames helped keep things from spinning out of control elsewhere in the country.

And the whole time, Julian stood by and watched.

Four Mile Run Park wasn't heavily populated after dark. A few joggers went by, some of them with dogs in tandem, and cyclists flowed past on their way through, but the night wasn't warm enough for people to sit on the benches just for the pleasure of fresh air. The bars were chill beneath his legs before he threaded heat into them, and the wind bit at his cheeks as he waited.

Fortunately, he didn't have to wait long. Grayson was a punctual woman.

Julian rose to his feet when he saw her approaching. Once she was near enough to speak without raising her voice, Grayson said dryly, “You make me feel like a character from a spy thriller, meeting you this way.”

She could pass for one without much trouble. Her black coat blended with the shadows, and her dark skin scarcely stood out more; only her cropped hair was a spot of brightness, shocking white beneath one of the scattered lamps. Julian said, “I can't exactly do things officially, when nobody has made
me
official.”

Grayson inclined her head to one side. He took the implicit invitation, ambling across the grass at a slow pace, away from the cyclists and joggers, toward the stream that gave the park its name. “Your unofficial status means I shouldn't even be talking to you,” Grayson said. “Unless you called me out here for a chat about your courses for next fall — which I doubt.”

Julian didn't smile. They both knew he wasn't likely to ever go back to Welton. As near as anyone could tell, half the impulse that sent him to college in the first place had been work of the
geas
. Now that the Otherworld had returned, there was no need for him there anymore. The other half . . .

No one was likely to let him go on studying how to break the deep shield. Not when they were busy arguing about whether they should be allowed to inflict it on Kim, too.

“I'm tired of being useless,” Julian said bluntly. “If they aren't willing to make me a registered Guardian yet, fine. But I want to do
something
.”

It was galling, being relegated the sidelines after everything that had gone before. Julian had no illusions; he knew the task of dealing with the Otherworld was no longer his problem. It had only been circumstance and the
geas
that put him on the front lines in the first place. The situation was much too large for any single person, and there was little space in it for a private citizen to help out. It was a matter for the governments of the world and their duly appointed representatives.

At first he'd been able to help. He'd been questioned more than a dozen times by everyone from the DSPA to the CIA, relating every last bit of information he'd gathered about the sidhe. He even submitted to telepathic interrogation, letting one of his fellow wilders drag out shreds of memory too small for him to consciously recall. He hated the mental intrusion, but he was willing to endure it, for the sake of doing what he could.

After that, though . . . nothing.

“You took yourself out of the system,” Grayson reminded him. “There are well-honed procedures in place for shifting wilders from the Centers into the Guardian Corps, but not for doing the same with a college student barely two years into his degree.”

The difference shouldn't matter. College student or no, Julian was still a wilder. He had the Krauss rating and the resulting strength of gift, and he had all the training the Fiain received before reaching the age of majority. There were things he still needed to learn, but that was true of every wilder when they left the Center. There was no reason he couldn't go through the usual crash course and be certified as a Guardian.

No reason except bureaucracy. He'd dealt with it before, when he convinced everyone he should be permitted to get out of the system and go to Welton. Now he had to climb that mountain again, this time to get back
in
.